Ancient Egyptians told of an enormous snake that tried to stop the sun from rising. At Teotihuacan, in central Mexico, feathered serpents projected from the walls of a ceremonial pyramid. Hindu images show Vishnu resting on the coils of a vast serpent while the universe awaits another cycle of creation. Each tradition gave the serpent a different role. The Egyptian serpent attacked cosmic order; the Mesoamerican figure belonged to a setting of sacred and political power; Vishnu’s serpent supported the god through a period of dissolution.
Snakes offered ancient communities a familiar animal with unsettling abilities. They could kill with venom, vanish into the ground and emerge again, or shed an entire outer skin and seem renewed. In religious imagery, a snake might threaten a deity or protect one. It could also guard a king, a dwelling or a sacred place, or suggest access to the hidden realm of the dead. Its coils could also suggest enclosing and guarding another being.
Those similarities should not lead us to imagine that every society inherited the same serpent story. The Egyptian ouroboros, the Norse Jörmungandr, the Mesopotamian Ningishzida, the figures found at Minoan Knossos and the Buddhist serpent-king Mucalinda come from different periods and religious worlds. The surviving texts and objects establish how far historians can reasonably interpret those stories.
Why Snakes Became Powerful Religious Symbols
A snake shedding its outer skin appears to leave an old covering behind. The animal does not grow young again, but its appearance may help explain why some communities associated snakes with renewal. Its ability to enter crevices, water and underground spaces offered another possible association: movement between realms that people imagined beneath, upon or beyond the earth. These explanations are plausible ways of understanding the imagery. They do not tell us what every individual worshipper meant by a snake.
Venom made the animal both formidable and useful as a protector. Egyptian rulers wore the image of an upright cobra, the uraeus, on the forehead as a sign of divine authority and a warning to enemies. A Metropolitan Museum object record associates this protective cobra with goddesses including Wadjet. Yet Egyptian religious texts also describe a serpent determined to destroy the sun. The cobra and the hostile snake belonged to different ritual settings, and their meaning came from those settings rather than from their species alone.
Modern explanations sometimes turn every serpent into a simple symbol of evil, eternity or rebirth. Ancient images resist that approach. A carved serpent might identify a particular god, accompany an agricultural deity, defend a tomb or recall a known narrative. Even a circular snake cannot, without further evidence, establish that two cultures shared a story or understood the shape in the same way.
Egypt: Apep Threatened the Sun, While Mehen Protected It
In Egyptian thought, the continuing order of the world depended upon maat, a principle encompassing justice, proper conduct and the regular course of nature. Ra, the sun god, travelled through the realm of night before returning at dawn. Apep, also known as Apophis, tried to stop the solar boat and prevent that return. He represented the forces that threatened order. Each night, the sun’s survival required the serpent to be overcome or held back.
Priests acted against Apep as well as telling stories about him. The Bremner-Rhind Papyrus, British Museum EA10188 preserves the Book of Overthrowing Apep, a text prescribing words and actions intended to defeat the serpent. The surviving manuscript comes from the Ptolemaic period; a colophon dates it to 305 BCE. It shows that resisting Apep could form part of priestly ritual, although a single surviving papyrus cannot establish identical practices in every Egyptian temple across the centuries.
Other serpents accompanied Ra as protectors. Mehen, whose name is generally taken to mean the coiled or encircling one, appears in underworld imagery wrapped around the sun god. His coils provided a protected enclosure as Ra passed through the dangers of night. Egyptian religion could place a hostile serpent and a defending serpent in the same account of the sun’s journey without treating them as expressions of one moral idea.
Coiled serpents were familiar in Egypt long before some of the surviving religious images. During the Old Kingdom, people played a board game laid out as a spiral snake. A surviving board in the Fitzwilliam Museum and a scene of players in the Third Dynasty tomb of Hesy-Ra show its form. We do not know the rules, and the relationship between the game and later descriptions of Mehen as a protective being remains uncertain. The board demonstrates the long-standing appeal of the coiled snake; it cannot explain a creation story for which it preserves no words.
Another form, the ouroboros, shows a snake holding its own tail in its mouth. A gilded shrine from the tomb of Tutankhamun, who died in the fourteenth century BCE, bears an early securely documented Egyptian example. In a funerary composition conventionally called the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, serpent forms enclose a figure associated with the union of Ra and Osiris. The sun god’s return and Osiris’s regenerative power were brought together in an image of life after death. It is difficult to identify the earliest example of the tail-biting serpent with certainty, but this royal burial provides clear archaeological evidence for the motif.
The ouroboros is often called a symbol of eternity. Much of that familiar reading comes from later Greek, alchemical and modern uses of the image. Dana Michael Reemes, in his 2015 doctoral study of Egyptian ouroboros imagery, makes the case that protective enclosure offers a sounder recurring explanation for Egyptian examples than a universal meaning of eternity. The scene from Tutankhamun’s burial had its own funerary setting and concerned the renewal of life during the sun’s nocturnal journey. Its circle resembles Mehen’s protective coils, but it should not be confused with Apep’s efforts to defeat Ra.
A facsimile of the tomb of Sennedjem shows a serpent in a different role. It depicts a cat killing a snake in a scene associated with Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead. Elsewhere, the royal cobra stands ready to defend the king. An Egyptian image might show a serpent being destroyed, invoked for protection or displayed as the sign of a goddess. What mattered was the role assigned to that particular creature within the scene.
Mesopotamia: Tiamat and the Serpents of the Underworld
One of Mesopotamia’s major accounts of creation is the Akkadian poem Enūma Eliš, preserved in first-millennium BCE manuscripts that transmit an older literary tradition. It begins with Apsu, the fresh waters, and Tiamat, the salt waters, as primordial divine beings from whom other gods descend. Disputes among their descendants lead to conflict. Marduk, a younger god, defeats Tiamat, divides her body to form the structure of the heavens and establishes control over the waters. The world is ordered through divine combat and the reshaping of primordial matter.
Modern illustrations sometimes turn Tiamat into a giant snake, although the surviving poem does not securely describe her that way. She creates an army of frightening creatures, among them serpents and dragons, and the text compares the dividing of her body to cutting a fish. The published translation of Enūma Eliš keeps these details distinct. Tiamat is both primordial sea and divine opponent; the serpent-like monsters are among the beings she summons. Reading her as simply another world-serpent loses a central part of the poem, including its account of Marduk’s claim to rule.
Ningishzida belonged to another strand of Mesopotamian religious life. His worship is attested from the third millennium BCE, including at Lagash, a city-state in southern Mesopotamia. He was associated with snakes, vegetation, seasonal decline and the underworld. Those connections could bring the growth and disappearance of plants together with the journey of the dead. The University of Pennsylvania’s Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses project sets out the evidence from surviving texts and cult practices, which shows why Ningishzida cannot be reduced to a god of one narrowly defined sphere.
Gudea, ruler of Lagash, dedicated a surviving stone libation vessel to Ningishzida around 2120–2110 BCE. The stone libation vessel, described in the Louvre’s record for the vessel, AO 190, carries a serpent emblem usually identified as two snakes entwined around a staff, with composite serpent-dragons on either side. The snakes on this particular vessel do not rise from the god’s shoulders. That image occurs elsewhere, including on seals, where serpent-dragons appear to emerge from Ningishzida himself. Keeping the two designs separate helps us understand the iconography rather than merging several surviving objects into one.
Ningishzida also appears in The Death of Ur-Namma, the Sumerian literary account of the death and journey of Ur-Namma, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur. In passages preserved in the Oxford Electronic Text Corpus translation, the dead king presents offerings to underworld deities, Ningishzida among them. Some portions of the text are damaged. We can identify the god’s place in the underworld narrative without supplying a detailed gatekeeping episode that the surviving words do not allow us to reconstruct.
Vegetation, death and access to the netherworld all help explain Ningishzida’s association with snakes. His role concerns the powers governing transitions between states of life and death. It should be distinguished from Tiamat’s part in a Babylonian creation poem, even though both religious traditions developed within Mesopotamia. Neither one supplies a universal Mesopotamian meaning for every serpent.
Jörmungandr: The Norse Serpent Around the Human World
Far to the north, Norse stories place Jörmungandr in the ocean around Midgard, the world inhabited by humans. He is a child of Loki and the giantess Angrboða, as are the wolf Fenrir and Hel, who rules a realm of the dead. Their separate stories are covered in Spoken Past’s account of Loki’s children. According to the thirteenth-century Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson, the gods threw Jörmungandr into the sea. There he grew large enough to surround the land and grip his tail in his mouth. The serpent’s enormous body threatened the inhabited world. This was not an account of the world’s first creation.
Jörmungandr’s best-known clash with Thor begins when the thunder god goes fishing with the giant Hymir. Thor baits a hook with an ox’s head and catches the enormous serpent. In the Eddic poem Hymiskviða, their struggle disturbs the world before the serpent disappears beneath the waves. Snorri’s retelling adds a different sequence of details. Thor pushes his feet through the bottom of the boat to brace himself, while Hymir cuts the fishing line as Thor prepares his blow. These are related literary accounts, but their differences should remain visible.
The fishing story was already familiar before Snorri wrote. An eleventh-century memorial stone at Altuna in Sweden shows Thor confronting the serpent, including a foot passing through the boat. The image demonstrates that people in the Viking Age knew a recognizable version of the encounter. It cannot reveal what everyone who saw the stone believed about the myth. A carved memorial could refer to a familiar story without recording a complete religious explanation.
Jörmungandr returns at Ragnarök, the catastrophic struggle in which gods and their opponents kill one another and the world changes. Thor slays the serpent, then dies from its venom. In Völuspá, the creature stirs the sea as the final confrontation draws near. Jörmungandr therefore belongs especially to narratives of danger and destruction. The circle of his body is poor evidence for describing him as a kindly guardian preserving the world.
A tail held in a serpent’s mouth invites comparison with the Egyptian ouroboros. Yet the Egyptian funerary image and the Norse accounts survive in different languages, centuries and religious traditions. The former belongs to the renewal hoped for in a royal burial; Jörmungandr confronts Thor and participates in the world’s catastrophe. The shared outline offers no evidence, by itself, that one tradition borrowed from the other.
Teotihuacan: Feathered Serpents, Sacred Water and Political Power
At Teotihuacan, northeast of modern Mexico City, serpent imagery occupied a prominent place in the city’s ceremonial centre. The Feathered Serpent Pyramid, within the Ciudadela complex, was erected in the early centuries CE, as Teotihuacan developed large institutions and monumental spaces. Projecting serpent heads, feathered bodies, shells and other carvings covered its façades. Their combination of creatures and elements of water, earth and sky formed part of the religious imagery displayed at the centre of civic power.
A feathered serpent unites an earthbound animal with the plumage of a bird. The unusual body matters more than an assumption that each part had one fixed meaning. A surviving feathered serpent head in the Metropolitan Museum of Art retains traces of the paint that once covered the sculpture. The museum discusses the monument in relation to cosmology, military authority and rulership. The monument cannot be read as a fixed code in which every feather means wind and every snake means water.
Other projecting heads on the pyramid have proved difficult to identify. Traditionally they were called images of Tlaloc, the rain god, but the identification remains disputed. The Metropolitan Museum’s detailed study of the Ciudadela describes proposals that they represent a crocodilian creator, a fire serpent or perhaps a headdress rather than a separate being. The details of the stonework matter here. A familiar name applied to a monument is not necessarily the explanation best supported by its surviving features.
Excavations uncovered people sacrificed and buried under and around the pyramid, sometimes with weapons or objects suggesting military identity. The Metropolitan Museum estimates a total of about 200 to 260 sacrifices, and reports 137 individuals archaeologically documented in the account it summarizes. Work directed by Saburo Sugiyama and other archaeologists connected the burials to the building’s construction and political role. The remains establish a planned ceremonial programme. They cannot tell us that the feathered serpent itself demanded blood at the beginning of creation.
The Feathered Serpent became prominent in later Mesoamerican religion; the Mexica knew a major figure as Quetzalcoatl. Those later accounts provide possible comparisons, but Teotihuacan’s own political history and writing remain too poorly understood for us to read its pyramid directly through a much later tradition. Its sculptures and excavated burials are substantial evidence for a city in which serpent imagery, ritual and power were closely connected. The precise stories told about those figures remain harder to recover.
The Snake Figurines of Knossos: What Can We Actually Know?
The snake-bearing women found at Knossos raise a different archaeological problem. In 1903 Arthur Evans’s excavations at the palace on Crete uncovered faience figurines from compartments called the Temple Repositories. Two elaborate female figures associated with snakes became particularly famous. Usually dated to around 1600–1500 BCE, they had been deposited with other ritual objects after a palace sanctuary was destroyed. Their findspot supports a religious context, though it does not settle who the figures represent. Spoken Past’s overview of Bronze Age Cretan palaces describes the broader setting of these Bronze Age Cretan palaces.
The Heraklion Archaeological Museum places the objects among a group of ritual figurines and considers whether they were linked to a chthonic, or underworld-associated, deity. One of the smaller figures has a feline on her head. Their deposition with other ritual objects supports a sanctuary setting. They do not preserve a goddess’s name or a creation myth, much less an account of why participants handled or displayed images of snakes.
The figurines have also changed since their discovery. Evans restored missing sections, and those reconstructions helped shape the images that later circulated in books and museums. Those restored sections must be distinguished from the surviving Bronze Age fragments. Without deciphered Minoan religious texts, claims that the snakes protected grain stores, embodied ancestral household guardians or directly anticipated the Greek agathos daimōn remain conjectural. Similar imagery does not establish an unbroken religious tradition.
The faience figurines place snakes within the religious imagery of a Minoan palace sanctuary. They cannot tell us whether the female figures were goddesses, priestesses or some other kind of sacred representation. The surviving artefacts are specific and informative, even though the spoken beliefs and ceremonies surrounding them have been lost.
Ananta Shesha: The Serpent Beneath Vishnu
In Hindu traditions, Shesha, also called Ananta, supports Vishnu rather than attacking him. Ananta conveys endlessness, and images of Vishnu, a deity associated with sustaining cosmic order, often place him on the serpent’s coils in a cosmic ocean. In many accounts this is the interval after a world has dissolved and before creation begins again. The serpent gives the resting god a stable place during that passage between cosmic cycles.
A prominent example appears at the Dashavatara Temple at Deogarh in northern India, usually dated to the Gupta period around the sixth century CE. The carved relief of Vishnu resting on Ananta belongs to a wider programme of stories about the god, described in Smarthistory’s architectural study. We can examine the image as evidence of how worshippers and artists represented the tradition at that temple. It would be too much to assume that this relief supplies an exact account of every theological version told before or after its making.
In later Vaishnava traditions, a lotus growing from Vishnu may carry Brahma, who brings forth the world. Purāṇic texts and schools of Hindu thought differ in their accounts of how that process unfolds. Ananta’s continuing presence, however, provides an image of stability across the destruction and renewal of worlds. He participates in the setting of creation by supporting Vishnu; the serpent is not himself necessarily the creator.
That role differs sharply from Marduk’s victory over Tiamat. The Babylonian god brings cosmic order about through battle and the division of a primordial adversary. Vishnu’s serpent holds a god through the interval between cosmic cycles. Both traditions place immense supernatural figures within accounts of the universe, but the action and its religious meaning cannot be made identical.
Mucalinda: A Serpent-King Who Sheltered the Buddha
Buddhist tradition preserves another kind of serpent protection in the story of Mucalinda. He is a nāga, one of the powerful serpent beings known in Buddhist, Hindu and Jain sources, often linked to water, sacred places and concealed realms. In an early account preserved in the Pali Vinaya, bad weather arises after the Buddha’s awakening. Mucalinda emerges, wraps his coils around the meditating Buddha and spreads his hood above him, shielding him from cold and rain.
The translated early Buddhist passage places the episode near the Mucalinda tree in the weeks following the Buddha’s awakening. When the storm passes, the serpent withdraws, assumes human form and pays his respects. The sequence explains his protective role and his recognition of the Buddha. It does not describe the creation of the physical universe. The Buddha’s awakening has its own meaning within Buddhist teaching and should not be recast as a cosmic creation event.
Images of the protected Buddha became especially popular in Southeast Asia. A twelfth-century Cambodian bronze in the Metropolitan Museum shows him beneath a naga’s hood; the museum connects the popularity of this subject with the reign of Jayavarman VII. Met also records a seventh-century example from central Thailand. Together, those objects show a narrative from South Asia entering artistic traditions in regions with their own established serpent imagery. Their dates and local styles matter as much as their shared subject.
Mucalinda’s protection does not make every Buddhist nāga benevolent. Buddhist sources describe serpent beings with differing dispositions, just as Egyptian accounts distinguished hostile Apep from protective Mehen. The protection of the meditating Buddha is a particular episode, recognizable in texts and in works of art whose meaning developed in different local settings. Its value as historical evidence lies in that specificity.
Why Serpents Mean Different Things in Different Myths
The surviving accounts assign serpents markedly different roles. Apep tried to obstruct the sun, while Mehen sheltered Ra. Ningishzida’s serpent imagery belonged to a god connected with plants and the underworld. Jörmungandr encircled Midgard and faced Thor. Feathered serpents appeared amid the civic power and sacrificial rites of Teotihuacan. Ananta sustained Vishnu, and Mucalinda sheltered the Buddha. Looking only at the animal’s form would conceal nearly everything those stories actually say.
At times, contact between societies helps explain the circulation of serpent images. Buddhist texts and artworks document the movement of Mucalinda imagery from South Asia into Southeast Asia. In other cases we have no comparable evidence of transmission. Egyptian depictions of a snake biting its tail and Norse descriptions of a serpent surrounding the world do not establish a shared origin. To make that argument, historians would need evidence from chronology, exchange routes, texts and objects, as well as a convincing account of local meanings.
Skin shedding, underground movement and the ability to coil around another being offer sensible reasons why snakes appealed to many ancient artists and religious thinkers. The written stories and surviving objects show how particular communities understood those properties. Whether a serpent guarded a king, threatened the sun, occupied the sea or sheltered a teacher depends on its place in an identifiable tradition. The differences are as much a part of the history as the recurring image of the snake.
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